Setting the Scene: Context in Snapshots from 2022, 2023, and 1900

Badin, Sindh, September 2022: She slaps her scrawny toddler across the face while she balances an infant on her frail hip. Tempers are running high in this building—sounds of shouting, slapping, screaming, and crying are recurring. It is a government school in the district of Badin, Sindh province, Pakistan. The school building serves as a shelter for flood affectees. Meals, medicines, and other aid are distributed sporadically by philanthropic initiatives, military men, political workers, religious groups, local landlords, or civil administrators. The food often arrives stale and causes illness. Approximately a thousand people seek refuge in a building whose sanitation facilities cannot keep pace. Some wish they had died instead of ending up here, while others choose to pick cotton from flooded fields, standing in toxic water for a higher wage, to try and escape this shelter.

Karachi, Sindh, August 2023: She works in the Korangi Industrial Area at a factory producing garments for a global clothing brand. She lives with her family in the Ibrahim Hyderi area of Karachi. Many of her neighbours are fisherfolk (Idrees, 2021). She also comes from a fishing community in Badin. Her family has not been fishing for over a generation. Water is either syphoned off by canals, barrages, and dams upstream, or polluted by untreated industrial waste. Fish are dying. Meanwhile, intimidation by Rangers, the Coast Guard (Shah 2005) and the Fisheries Department (Ahmad 2021) are thriving. In search of a livelihood, her family moved to Karachi years ago.